Holden's relationship with two of his teachers.

MR SPENCER AND MR ANTOLINI
Description, Comparing and Relationship with Holden.

The Catcher in the rye is a famous novel written by J.D Salinger, and in this novel he introduces us to many strong and different characters. Two interesting characters in the novel are Holden’s two teachers, Mr Spencer and Mr Antolini. Mr Spencer is introduced to us readers in the beginning (chapter. 2), while Mr Antolini takes his part towards the end (chapter. 24) of the novel. In this blog we’re going to compare the differences and similarities between the two of them and their relationship with the main character, Holden. We’re also going to describe them.

Mr Spencer is Holden’s history teacher at the school, Pencey Prep, and the only one that seems to care when Holden is expelled. His physical condition is lousy, even during ‘normal’ circumstances due to age, but now it’s worse because he has the grippe. Yet his mind is not affected by the different faults he’s suffering from. Mr Spencer and his wife didn’t have too much money, but weren’t poor either. This is expressed in the beginning when Mrs Spencer opens the door to Holden. Then Holden tells us;

‘They didn’t have a maid or anything, and they always opened the door themselves. They didn’t have too much dough.’

In contrast, Mr Antolini is quite wealthy man which is described in the beginning of chapter 24 where it says;

‘Mr and Mrs Antolini had this very swanky apartment over on Sutton Place, with two steps that you can go down to get in the living room, and a bar and all’.

Even though Mr Antolini is younger than Mr Spencer, his health isn’t perfect, he ruins it with smoking and heavy drinking. Holden’s first meeting with Mr Antolini was when he went to Elkton Hills, where Mr Antolini was his teacher in English.

Holden’s relationship with the two teachers is so different, and yet so alike. When it comes to the relationship between Holden and Mr Spencer, Holden likes this teacher but still describes him as a ‘phony’. One example of this is when he talks about Mr Spencer with his sister Phoebe;

‘Even the couple of nice teachers on the faculty, they were phonies too, I said. There was this old guy, Mr Spencer. (…) But you should have seen him when the headmaster, old Thurmer, came in the history class and sat down in the back of the room (…) Old Spencer’d practically kill himself chuckling and smiling and all, like as if Thurmer was a goddam prince or something.’

We think that since the teacher was this ‘bootlicker’, Holden looses respect for him. Holden himself is against authorities, this incident in the classroom made Holden want to puke and according to us he felt betrayed.

‘He was about the best teacher I ever had, Mr Antolini. He was a pretty young guy, not much older than my brother D.B., and you could kid around with him without losing respect for him.’

This is how Holden describes Mr Antolini before the night when he sleeps over at the Antolini’s. In the middle of the night Holden wakes up finding Mr Antolini patting him on the head. Holden finds this very awkward and quickly comes up with an excuse to leave the house in the middle of the night. Suddenly he thinks that Mr Antolini is a pervert. We think that Holden has a hard time dealing with the fact that Mr Antolini behaved so strange, he’s confused and don’t really know what to believe. Wheatear or not Mr Antolini was a pervert, this act had an impact on their relationship, and Holden felt betrayed once again.

These two men are described as two of the few adults Holden accepts. While other treats Holden as a rough-neck, these characters try to understand and help him. This similarity between the two teachers is the biggest one, maybe the only one, except that they both are teachers. They are different in both personalities, age and social class, which in a way must affect their relationship with Holden. Holden goes from describing the two teachers as great persons to start finding faults in them. We don’t know if Holden is fair in this judgement of these characters, since the only view we get is Holden’s. But we can imagine that he feels that they’re becoming too much of a ‘phony adult’ and that he don’t want to be influenced by them.

By Helena Johansson and Jenny Karlsson